Comparing the Impacts of Some North-North and North-South Trade Agreements on Trade in Services

This paper employs a theoretically and robust gravity model of trade to analyze the effects of some North-North and North-South trade agreements on services. More precisely, we focus on twenty-three services trade agreements based on this distinction. We use a worldwide sample covering the period 1985-2016 with aggregated and disaggregated data for nine services sectors (transport, travel, communication, computer and information, construction, finance, insurance, personal, cultural and recreational services, other business services). We estimate trade creation and trade diversion effects where these latter have not been enough investigated empirically at the level of exchanges of services. We also examine the effects of the depth of these trade agreements on services trade through WTO-X core provisions. The results indicate that trade agreement effects on trade in services have dissimilar effects and vary across regions, sectors and depth.